by Christina Ledbetter

Taking a Stand

Benson bought a twenty-dollar coffee table off Amazon and sawed the legs down to about a foot each. Last Friday, I hauled the table to his office (he drives a scooter and we decided strapping a coffee table onto the back would prove unwise), and helped him clear off his desk, position the table on top, and then put everything back onto the table.

He says sitting is killing America, so now he performs his engineering sorcery standing up.

(Note: his desk is in the shape of a horseshoe, meaning only one side of his work station requires standing up, meaning he can sit down at the other side whenever his feet grow weary. Meaning don’t write me and tell me how he’s going to end up paralyzed from this, unless you ACTUALLY know someone who got paralyzed this way, and in that case you better tell me.)

Last night I asked him, “Hey, when you’re working standing up, do you shift your weight from one leg to other?”

“I don’t know. I think I’ll try not to. It doesn’t seem good for you,” he claimed.

And then I was like, “But it feels so natural to shift our weight, like, God designed us to do it. My hip bones just go there without me even thinking. So it’s probably good for us, it being so easy and all.”

Benson stared at me for a few seconds, giving me a moment to really think about what I was saying.

I was claiming that if something was very easy to do with your body, it must be good for you.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I admitted. “I mean, snorting coke is probably bad for you, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be tricky. You just plug one nostril!”

Please allow me to disprove my theory further…

I hope we’ve all learned something here.

(But for the record, I’m also working standing up today, and I’m shifting my weight like nobody’s business.)